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Getting to Know Your Vehicle
4 Reasons Heavy Loads Make Truck Wheel Alignments More Important
Sofia Curtis
You should already know that regular wheel alignments are important for any vehicle, but they're often particularly important for trucks that regularly carry heavy loads. During this routine maintenance job, the angles of your truck's wheels will be realigned back to manufacturer specifications in order to reduce wear and keep it moving forwards properly.
Of course, trucks differ from most other vehicles in that they can carry relatively heavy loads. If your truck is regularly loaded with heavy cargo, here are just four reasons why regular wheel alignments are vital.
1. Safety
Regular wheel alignments prevent a vehicle from pulling to one side and help ensure proper handling. This is particularly important if you're regularly carrying heavy loads since the added weight will already impact performance. You'll need more acceleration to get going and more time to break, and you'll tend to find that turns take longer to start. When you combine the effects of misaligned wheels with the challenges of driving with heavy loads, it becomes much harder to drive safely. As such, ensuring your wheels are regularly aligned is vital to keep you and your fellow road users from harm.
2. Efficiency
When you load up your truck, you increase its rolling resistance. This means more power is required to move the vehicle, so you're going to be consuming more fuel whenever you carry heavier loads. Again, this is an issue that can be compounded by misaligned wheels. They increase friction and waste fuel, and that issue becomes worse when more weight is pressed down on the tires. Though you can't prevent heavy loads from increasing fuel consumption, you can prevent misaligned wheels from making the problem even worse.
3. Reliability
Misaligned wheels create uneven tire wire, which will significantly reduce the life of your tires and increase your risk of suffering a blowout. Since heavy loads place additional pressure on your tires, they combine with misaligned wheels to make blowouts and early tire replacements even more likely. If you want to keep yourself from buying an expensive set of new tires, make sure you get your wheels aligned regularly.
4. Off-Road Stress
Many trucks are used to cover rugged terrain, and this increases their risk of developing misaligned wheels since going over holes, rocks, or uneven surfaces can throw things out of alignment. Carrying heavy loads makes this problem worse since the added weight will be thrown down on certain wheels when they cover any uneven terrain.
Find out more about truck wheel alignments.
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